rose. Could the sensations of an enthusiastic neophyte in that wonderful city be expressed with more gusto! No Life of Henry James need be written, for, as Mr Lubbock points out, these letters give us the man himself absolutely-his sagacious judgment, his robust humour, his felicitous powers of witty description, and his large kindliness. To me the most interesting letters are those which he wrote during his earlier visits to Europe, when he met William Morris and his wife "this dark, silent, medieval woman with her medieval toothache," and Ruskin Angelo-all the Piazzas and bed a wiser man than I last ruins and monuments. The effect is something indescribable. For the first time I know what the picturesque is. In St Peter's I stayed some time. It's even beyond its reputation. It was filled with foreign ecclesiastics - great armies encamped in prayer on the marble plains of its pavement, an inexhaustible physiognomical study. To crown my day, on my way home, I met his Holiness in person-driving in prodigious purple state,-sitting dim within the shadows of his coach with two uplifted benedictory fingers -like some dusky Hindoo idol in the depths of its shrine. Even if I should leave Rome to-night I should feel that I have caught the keynote of its operation on the senses. I have looked along the grassy vista of the Appian Way and seen the topmost stonework of the Coliseum sitting shrouded in the light of heaven, like the edge of an Alpine chain. I've trod the Forum, and I have scaled the Capitol. I've seen the Tiber hurrying along, as swift and dirty as history! From the high tribune of a great chapel in St Peter's I have heard in the papal choir a strange old man sing in a shrill unpleasant soprano. I've seen troops of little tonsured neophytes clad in scarlet, marching and counter-marching and ducking and flopping, like poor little raw recruits for the heavenly host. In fine, I've seen Rome, and I shall go to scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of unreason and illusion,”—and Huxley and Tennyson and Browning and Tourgueneff and Flaubert. Such encounters gave him full scope for his power of fantastic description. Mrs Kemble he writes: Of Mrs Kemble has no organised surface at all; she is like a straight deep cistern, without a cover, or even, sometimes, a bucket, into which, as a mode of intercourse, one must tumble with a splash.' One wonders what Mrs Kemble would have thought about this. Of another lady he writes: "She is crazy, stage-struck, scatter-brained, what the French call extravagante; but I can't praise her better than by saying that though she is on the whole proportion as he has come steadily from the less simple in subject to the more simple He knew and from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws. . Though he was painstaking and almost over-tolerant in advising friends who writers, he criticised the art of his time severely as well as acutely. Writing in 1897 of Mr Kipling, he says: My view of his prose future has much shrunken in the light of one's increasingly observing how little of life he can make use of. Almost nothing civilised except steam and patriotism—and the latter only in verse, where I hate it so, especially mixed up with God and goodness, that that half spoils my enjoyment of his great talent. Almost nothing of the complicated soul or of the female form or of any question of shades-which latter constitute, to my sense, the real formative literary discipline. In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have quite given that up in When I do see him, it is one of the best human pleasures that London has for me. But I don't understand his life that is the manner and tenor of his production,— a complete studio existence, with doors and windows closed, and no search for impressions outside-no open air, no real daylight, and no looking out for it. The things he does in these conditions have exceeding beauty-but they seem to me to grow colder and colder,pictured abstractions, less and less observed. Such as he is, however, he is certainly the most distinguished artistic figure among Englishmen to-day the only one who has escaped vulgarisation and on whom claptrap has no hold. His letters to his famous brother are touching memorials of the deep affection uniting two rare spirits which were often at variance intellectually. William James did not always evince a whole-hearted admiration for Henry's novels, and would criticise them with the frankness that was character istic of the family. Henry had are being and will be written. an immense admiration for William and his work, but life, I think, interested him more than even his brother's philosophy: there are surprisingly few allusions to the latter in the correspondence. The complete history of a unique mind-there can be no higher praise for an autobiography than this, and Henry James's letters are a masterpiece of self-revelation. If these desultory notes induce any one who has formerly shied at this great writer's work to read Mr Lubbock's volumes, they will have attained their object. Unless the art of writing is destined to perish before the advance of the film, wireless, telepathy, poison-gas, and other modern amenities, we may safely conclude that good letters Even I have known half a dozen people with whom it was a delight to correspond. To give only one instance: the letters of Rupert Brooke, usually dashed off in a vein of gay bravura, were a joy to all his friends, and it is to be hoped that a selection from them will be published. There must, too, be many people living, not necessarily authors, who have a natural gift for epistolary self-expression, and possess both humour and intelligence. What of Lord Morley and Sir Arthur Balfour? What of Mr Conrad, Mr Wells, Mr Chesterton, and Lord Birkenhead? What, above all, of Mr Shaw? I feel certain that his letters are wonderful, but if I unfortunately survive him, may Heaven preserve me from the office of editor. ECHOES FROM THE MARSHES. (BEING FURTHER TALES OF THE MA'ADAN.) BY FULANAIN. BIMBASHI. He was so curiously like a dear old "dug-out major who served with my regiment in the early days of the war that at our first meeting I dubbed him "Bimbashi "—the equivalent of major in the Turkish army. White hair, hooked nose, deep-set eyes, and thin erect figure made up a striking resemblance, which was heightened by the fact that, when I first saw him, he seemed to be standing at the head of his company. from their leader; and turning to the headman beside me I asked, "Who is the old Bimbashi ? To my surprise a roar of laughter greeted the question. The marshmen's sense of humour, always easily roused by the mildest joke if sufficiently obvious, seemed to be tickled by the epithet, of which apparently they saw the appropriateness. "Bimbashi-the Hakim calls him the Bimbashi," they repeated one to the other, like the children they are. And so it came about that old Miskail became known to me and to 66 out of the the whole tribe as 'al Bimbashi." I had been settling some small dispute or other in the village of the Bait Yassin, and as I came headman's hut my eye was caught by the tall figure of an old man on the opposite bank of the little stream. He stood perfectly still, gazing at the first British officer he had ever seen in the marshes; and behind him, equally intent on a sight of the unusual visitor, stood a crowd of small boys. There were perhaps forty of them, all stark naked, all breathlessly on tiptoe and rigid with excitement. They seemed to be standing to attention, awaiting the word of command vant announced that a man round him that afternoon, and wished to see me. 66 Who is it? I asked. "He says he is a Bimbashi,' he is a Bimbashi," answered my servant, halfpuzzled, half-amused. 66 Let him come in,” I said. Stooping his tall height to enter the tent door, Miskail entered. He was a fine-looking man, still, in spite of his white hair, handsome, with the dark, virile, good looks of the marsh Arab. But now that I saw him more closely, I could well believe what I had been told that morning, that he would have been headman of the Bait Yassin if it had not been that the tribe considered him slightly mad. His dark eyes were strangely bright, and his hands, unusually delicate and fine for a marshman, were the restless nervous hands of the highly-strung. Miskail had come to unfold a wonderful scheme, an idea of his own, which was to be of incalculable help in my work of keeping down raids on river traffic. He reminded me that during the last month there had been a recrudescence of these raids, most of which had taken place in the reach between Hamdan and Gurmat Shergi, not far distant from my present camp. Then, stammering with eagerness and excitement, he disclosed his plan: he would enrol, in a little army of his own, a number of the small boys I had seen of them would form patrols to watch the river bank and give warning of thieves. I was strongly tempted to laugh, for it seemed absurd to think that the problem might be solved by a crowd of naked little village boys. But Miskail urged his scheme with sound arguments. "What do these boys, Sahib," he said, "from sunrise to sunset, aye, and during the night as well! They are always in mischief, often learning to be thieves even as their fathers are. And while they play, the raiders creep silently through the reeds, and lie in wait by the river's edge. Only by setting a good watch can your Honour prevent this; and what eyes are keener and sharper than the eyes of youth? I can place at your service a hundred pairs of sharp eyeseyes, too, that since first they opened on the world have been accustomed to gaze at reeds and rushes and glinting water." "You want a yearly present such as I give to Awasha," I said, half in jest. But old Miskail was deeply shocked. "Sahib, it is true that I am fond of tobacco," he said; "but this service, which your Honour will find is a great service, I offer with no thought of a reward. I wish only to serve the great Hakuma.1 If it were not for the jealousy 1 Government. |